Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: Department of the Treasury

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, March 30, 2018:

Vivien Kellems, American industrialist and tax protester

Vivien Kellems, along with her brother Edgar, invented a specialized cable grip for electrical cables and founded Kellems Cable Grips in 1927. The company prospered.

But in 1943, during the Second World War, Congress passed the Tax Payment Act, which required the payers of wages, not the receiver of wages, to withhold estimated taxes and remit them quarterly to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (later called the IRS).

The injustice was apparent to Vivien and in 1948 she refused, declaring that “If they wanted me to be their agent, they’d have to pay me, and I want a badge.”

They didn’t, and instead simply seized the amount the agency thought she owed from her company bank account. She sued in federal court and finally got her money back.

Withholding has allowed the government to collect far more money far more efficiently with far less bleating from the sheep as explained by the U. S. Department of the Treasury:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, February 7, 2018:

With Wall Street regaining its footing following the decline that started last Thursday, commentators in the mainstream media are still searching for the decline’s cause. Initially they claimed that it was an unexpected surge in inflation evidenced by the rise in the yield of 10-year U.S. Treasury notes approaching three percent (in early September it was closer to two percent). This was followed by the jobs report that announced that wages increased 2.9 percent year-over-year, up from just over two percent previously.

Writers at the Wall Street Journal dug deeper: The selloff was caused by — ready? — “volatility sellers, risk-party funds and algorithmic trading.” They then went into mind-numbing detail about how these strategies work and how the crash cost people using in them in excess of $200 billion.

Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, told TheStreet.com that maybe it was the Federal Reserve’s unhappiness with The Donald:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, December 13, 2017:

Buried in the latest report from the Department of the Treasury is this nugget: Through the first two months of the fiscal year, which began on October 1, the deficit (the difference between revenues and spending) was 11 percent higher than the same two months last year. And this despite revenues (taxes from individuals and corporations) setting records. The $433 billion the government collected in October and November was $13 billion more than it collected in the same period last year, and $11.3 billion more than it collected the year before.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, August 16, 2017:

Zombies are often depicted as mindless, unthinking henchmen operating under the spell of an evil magician. A lot of that defines Operation Choke Point, a mindless, unconstitutional apparition invoked by the evil intentions of the previous administration to shut down gun stores, payday loan companies, tobacco sellers, and the like. Each of these was determined to be “disreputable” dictated by the totalitarian worldview of Obama and his henchmen.

Declared dead back in 2015, it lives. Back on January 29, 2015, the FDIC said it was dead:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, August 15, 2017:

Five Republican Congressmen fired off a letter last week to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Fed Chair Janet Yellen, and Acting U.S. Comptroller Keith Noreika, demanding that they repudiate the Obama administration’s successful and continuing efforts to strangle financially gun shops and other supposedly “high-risk” and “disreputable” businesses. Called Operation Choke Point, the program continues despite declamations from the Justice Department to the contrary.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, February 28, 2017:

United States Border Patrol Dodge Ram at a checkpoint near Tucson, Arizona.

With the announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday that sites have already been selected to start building the wall across the country’s southern border came increased concerns about how it was going to be paid for. Said the DHS:

Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team said Thursday that he has picked Republican Indiana Senator Dan Coats to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Coats is a hardliner on Russia but soft on the Second Amendment.

Coats would spearhead changes to make the ODNI more efficient. Created in 2004 to coordinate the information-gathering efforts of 17 separate agencies, the ODNI is currently headed by outgoing director James Clapper (shown, middle).

Clapper was unanimously confirmed for that position in August 2010 by the Senate, but

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, November 30, 2016:

Ayn Rand passed away in 1982 at age 77 when Donald Trump was just 36. But the astounding success of her masterwork, Atlas Shrugged, led to an interview at the Trump Tower on Monday in the form of one of her most avid fans: John Allison.

Allison, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina in 1971, read a copy of it as a young man and it changed his life. There’s an outside possibility that it might change the life of millions of others.

Following graduation he went to work for BB&T Corporation, a small rural bank in North Carolina. By 1989 Allison was the bank’s CEO. By 2010 he had grown the bank from $4.5 billion in assets to

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 28, 2015:

English: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and senior staff, react in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as the House passes the health care reform bill.

A recent poll by Rasmussen revealed that just 37 percent of likely U.S. voters believe the government should mandate that every American have health insurance, down four percentage points from its previous poll and the lowest level of support since December 2013. In addition 52 percent of Americans now oppose government-mandated health insurance, the highest it has been since that December 2013 poll.

U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer’s decision back on September 9 to allow the House Republicans’ lawsuit against President Obama to go forward should bring comfort to that majority of Americans who,

Within hours of the “brinkmanship” press release by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, major media began to repeat the highly dubious risks outlined by the department without reading carefully exactly what it contained. The headline and opening paragraph were all that the echo chambers needed:

This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013:

The president anticipated glitches when his key legislative centerpiece was rolled out on Tuesday, and he got them:

In the first week, the first month, the first three months, I would suspect that there will be glitches.

This is 50 states, a lot of people signing up for something. And there are going to be problems. And I guarantee you, there will be problems….

Even fawning CNN had to admit there were problems: “We tried in about 20 different states’ [exchanges]. In 12 of them we hit glitches. Sometimes it made it impossible to sign up. There were error messages….”

And then Obama had the chutzpah to compare the Obamacare roll out with the recent Apple roll out of its new operating system:

Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system and within days they found a glitch, so they fixed it.

I don’t remember anybody suggesting [that] Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.

There’s just one tiny problem with this analogy. I don’t remember any government agent holding a gun to my head forcing me to buy an iPhone.

But the Obamacare Kool-Aid has affected others, not just Obama. HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the glitches a great success:

We have had a few slowdowns, a few glitches, but it’s sort of a great problem to have. It’s based on the fact that the volume has been so high.

Unspoken is the assumption that Obamacare hits on exchange websites is so high because Obamacare is so popular. Isn’t that like saying that paying income taxes must be popular because so many people file income tax returns?

The problems were rife, all across the country. The moment New York’s new healthcare website was launched at 8AM, it crashed. Seekers “were greeted with error messages … [and] the links for employers, employees and brokers also experienced periodic problems,” according to CBS News. In California an insurance broker scheduled an appointment with two of his clients to be the first in the state to sign up for Obamacare, but had to cancel the appointment when he discovered that he wasn’t “approved” to sign them up, and he couldn’t tell his clients how much they would have to pay for the insurance anyway – the premium calculation bot wasn’t working. Besides, he learned later that his customers’ applications wouldn’t be received by the insurance companies for at least a month. Aside from that, things went well.

In Washington, DC, people trying to determine if they were eligible either for Medicaid or for subsidies to purchase insurance on its exchange will have to wait. In Vermont, that state’s exchange won’t be able to accept premium payments until sometime in the middle of November. In Oregon, only a few specially selected individuals were allowed to get online as its rollout was only a “beta test” – the real rollout would be taking place later.

The administration admitted that its own website was suffering a delay in its online shopping system for small business owners, along with a delay in its Spanish-speaking site. In Colorado, its exchange, Connect for Colorado, was forced to delay certain computer functions, and applicants had to call a hotline to complete the process. In Iowa there were no certified “navigators” to take those calls. Reuters noted that these glitches showed up in 24 of the state exchanges. Maryland’s exchange was delayed for four hours, and Minnesota said it would be late in the day when it would be able to confirm its connection to the federal data base.

So much for the triumphant start. As Joel Ario, a health care consultant who used to work at the Department of Health and Human Services, said: “Nobody is going to say we’re not starting on October 1st. But in some situations you have seen a redefinition of what ‘start’ means.”

Sarah Kliff, a writer for the Washington Post who has been tracking the Obamacare launch for months, said that yesterday wasn’t really “the big day” after all – it was just the beginning of a “soft launch”:

Instead, it’s January 1st, the day that the individual mandate takes effect and any plans purchased on the [exchanges] actually kick in.

The space between October and December is viewed … as a soft launch: the time to make the new web sites live, sort out the kinks and get the sites in prime condition for the beginning of 2014.

Enrollment started on Tuesday but any insurance purchased won’t become effective until January 1. And for those who delay, they have until March 15th to make their purchases or else be faced with paying a fine – oops, a tax, not a fee.

There are some other problems, too. According to the Kaiser Foundation, more than three quarters of those without insurance didn’t even know that the launch date was October 1st. And how about this for a marketing problem: the insurance companies will have to persuade healthy young people to buy insurance they don’t want in order to offset the costs of unhealthy people pouring into the system. Here’s how the Associated Press explained it:

One of the biggest challenges to the law’s success is the ability of insurers to persuade relatively young and healthy people to buy insurance as a way to balance the costs for the sicker people who are likely to get their coverage as quickly as possible.

Previous such rollouts have hardly been successful. When Massachusetts opened its version of Obamacare in late 2006, it took a total of 18 separate interactions – web visits, emails, or phone calls – before an individual could get coverage. After 9/11, the FBI tried – for 12 years – to upgrade its computer system. It began with its Virtual Case File system which was given up for lost in 2005 after $600 million of taxpayers’ money, in favor of its Sentinel system, which finally went live last year.

The task with Obamacare is equally daunting: hooking up the national databases at the Department of the Treasury (the IRS) and the Department of Homeland Security with each of the states’ exchanges. As James Pethokoukis, a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, asked: “What could possible go wrong?”

All of these glitches may be considered in another light: they build the case for a national single-payer health care system that would do away with insurance companies and those messy and confusing state exchanges. Harry Reid, bless his statist heart, was interviewed on Las Vegas’ PBS program “Nevada Week in Review” last month, and was asked “where do we go from here?” Reid, for once, was crystal clear:

What we’ve done with Obamacare is [take] a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.

When pressed by one of the panelists about whether that meant that Obamacare was just one more step towards a single-payer, insurance- and exchange-free health care system run entirely by the government, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”

For totalitarians like Reid, Obama, Sebelius, and others, those glitches truly signify success after all.

California insurance broker Jason Andrew planned to help a couple of his clients sign up for Obamacare on Tuesday, the first day of the federal health care roll out, but couldn’t, for two reasons: first, he hadn’t yet been certified by the state to do so, and secondly, he couldn’t get accurate quotes from the state exchange’s computer. Andrew just laughed it off:

When Bernie Zalaznik, the Resident Vice President of the Wichita Branch Office of EMC Insurance Companies sent a letter to Kansas school districts on May 15th, just two weeks before Kansas Law 2052 takes effect, alarm bells went off. The letter said:

Have you ever wondered how much we as taxpayers actually owe because of commitments politicians have made on our behalf? Turns out, the answer is not as simple as you might think.

I.O.U.S.A. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

John C. Goodman has discovered how hard it is to make sense of the (often) nonsense parading as government statistics, especially concerning who owes how much to whom:

The place to start is with a report put out annually by the U.S. Treasury. There I learned that the federal government officially recognizes an outstanding debt of $17.5 trillion.

Ah, but that’s just the starting point, as bad as it is:

What about Social Security? It’s not on the list. What about Medicare? It’s not there either.

On further investigation, I found out why. “Social Security promises are part of current law and can be changed by Congress at any time,” I was told. Ditto for Medicare. And disability insurance. And survivors insurance. Etc. Etc. That’s a bureaucratic way of saying, “We can break those promises any time we want to.”

So there’s the accounting fiction. Thanks Mr. Goodman for ferreting it out for us. Because the promise can be broken at any time, it really isn’t

In a series of expected additional press releases, the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency is expanding its downgrade of debt securities tied to the now-lower-rated sovereign debt of the United States, including Israeli bonds, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and “pre-funded” municipal bonds. Other credits tied closely to U.S. sovereign debt are also expected to be downgraded shortly, with only a few exceptions.

Stephen Moore’s math in his Wall Street Journal article is compelling: by the time the Democrats’ proposed three-percent surtax on incomes over $1 million a year is added to all the other taxes people pay, those at the high end would be paying 62 percent of their income in federal and state income taxes.

He adds together the current 35 percent top income tax bracket to the three percent surtax, along with the expected repeal of the Bush “tax cuts” in 2012, payroll taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, the 0.9 percent Medicare surtax, the hidden 3.8 percent sales tax in ObamaCare which begins in 2014, and state income taxes, and he comes out, inevitably, to

When Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon Management, was convicted on all 14 counts of insider trading earlier this month, it made the phones ring in lawyers’ offices all across the country. Rajaratnam was only one of 47 people charged but he was by far the biggest fish caught in the net set by United States attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara. It took Bharara’s office 9 months of wire-tapping Rajaratnam’s phone, and 18 months of additional investigative work to get the convictions, and Bharara was ecstatic: “The message today is clear–there are rules and there are laws, and they apply to everyone, no matter who you are or how much money you have.”

Echoing the Obama administration’s characterization of the tax breaks being enjoyed by the five major oil companies (Exxon, ConocoPhillips, BP America, Shell, and Chevron) as “subsidies,” the Senate tried to remove them on Tuesday, but failed.